GREENSBORO — Lynda Layton leans over a sewing machine, carefully stitching a small piece of pleated navy blue fabric. She pauses, adjusts the swatch and stitches again. Within a minute, she has stitched elastic ear loops onto the fabric. What was just fabric and elastic is now a face mask that might be the only thing standing between a hospital worker and the coronavirus.
“If it can help anybody, that’s good,” Layton said.
Layton works on a sewing machine brought out of retirement from the textile industry. Layton herself is retired from Cone Mills, where she worked for 37 years. She now works part time in a sew shop for Hudson’s Hill, a small company that produces limited runs of denim wear and accessories like tote bags. The shop is in Revolution Mill, a former Cone mill that's now a sprawling mixed-use campus of offices, creative spaces and apartments. The fabric Layton sews is from Burlington, a former giant in the Piedmont textile industry that has a weaving facility in Reidsville. The masks Layton is sewing are being donated to Cone Health to provide a meager level of protection against the coronavirus for caregivers, custodians and other workers.
The path from Greensboro’s textile legacy to a hospital built on that legacy is not lost on Evan Morrison, owner of Hudson’s Hill and a self-professed geek of denim history, particularly that of Cone Mills.
“It’s been kinda cool to tap into the denim community to do things for the hospital system that was founded on denim money,” Morrison said.
Morrison, a Greensboro native who has traveled the globe pursuing an interest in textile and clothing, put his sew shop to work to make about 10,000 protective fabric masks after Cone Health sent out a call asking local companies to help with medical supplies. Morrison said the masks can be washed and reused.
“I read that health-care companies were suffering shortages of health-care equipment,” Morrison said. “Having a small-batch cut-and-sew facility and having a lot of network built within the local textile community, I thought we might be a resource.”
Morrison is just one of a growing number of local companies responding to a call Cone Health put out asking for donations of medical supplies to reinforce the hospital as patients affected by the coronaivirus COVID-19 climb.
Seth Coker also responded to Cone’s call.
Coker is a Greensboro developer who plays tennis with Dr. Dalton McLean of Cone Hospital. During a conversation with Coker, McLean expressed concern that the hospital would need more masks.
“I didn’t want our local health-care workers — not just the doctors and nurses, but the orderlies and other people that are working at Cone — to have to worry about this one thing that seemed like a solvable problem,” Coker said.
Coker turned to his old Grimsley High buddy Matt O’Connell.